It’s the morning after a night shoot on the Angels Flight railway in downtown Los Angeles for the TV series “Bosch” when author Michael Connelly calls to talk about detective Harry Bosch, a character he created 25 years ago and now returns to for a 20th time in the new thriller “Two Kinds Of Truth.”

“This year we’re adapting the book ‘Angels Flight’ so we’ve been filming there a lot,” says Connelly, the executive producer of the Amazon show, of his late night on the set. “Last night we wrapped the ninth episode of 10 for season 4. It seems like we just started the season and we’re finished.”

“Two Kinds Of Truth” finds Bosch returning to the San Fernando Police Department where he started to work as a volunteer detective in 2016’s “The Wrong Side Of Goodbye” after being forced to retire from the Los Angeles Police Department. In it Bosch works an investigation into the murder of two pharmacists in the small city in the San Fernando Valley, which opens up into a bigger probe of a prescription drug ring. At the same time he’s trying to clear his name of a claim that he knowingly put an innocent man on death row years earlier.

“I like to write small to big,” Connelly says of the inspiration for the new book. “This book starts with a double murder in a pharmacy, and that’s a significant crime, especially to those it touches, but I wanted to use it to get into this larger issue.”

In this case, the larger issue is the nation’s deadly opioid abuse epidemic.

“It’s pretty inescapable in our society today and I have a had a couple of friends who’ve fallen into that,” he says. “I watched one bottom out and climb back up, and there’s a certain inspiration in that.”

In researching the book Connelly says he met several investigators who work on prescription drug crimes, including one who worked undercover, and that also triggered a new idea.

“Twenty books in 25 years, I’ve never written about Harry Bosch going undercover, so there you had it,” he says. “You can teach an old dog a new trick. I found an opening to do something new with the character.”

Placing Bosch in the San Fernando Police Department in the previous book also offered that kind of fresh angle into a story, especially since Bosch’s age meant it was getting less and less believable that he could still hang onto his job in the LAPD. A chance encounter during production of the TV series a few years ago led Connelly there, he says.

“The town of San Fernando has tax base issues and budgetary issues, and like many small towns they are wide open to welcoming filming in their community,” Connelly says. “We needed a strip shopping center that we could control for three days for a big shootout on the ‘Bosch’ TV show, and I was standing there one day when a (police) sergeant named Irwin Rosenberg came up to me and said he liked the books.

“He said, ‘So I see he’s out of the LAPD, well, we would welcome him here,’ ” Connelly says.

The town had lost a quarter of his police department through budget problems that followed the 2009 economic crash, and like many small cities used retired cops from other departments to fill out their ranks.

“You just saved Harry Bosch, I felt like saying,” Connelly says. “Because when I had him move out of the LAPD I wasn’t sure what I would do with him.”

Other pieces fell into place quickly after that. Connelly says one of his longtime police sources had been pushed into retirement by the LAPD and ended up working for a small town in Northern California because he wasn’t ready to leave the kind of work he loved.

“It’s a certain thing in people that feel that they’re put on earth to do something like this, to try to even the books between good and evil,” he says of police like his real-life friend and the fictional Bosch, both of whom would rather work for almost no pay than sit at home or hit the golf course. “There’s others who just love the game, the game of cat and mouse, or the game of figuring out how somebody did something.”

And, just as San Fernando welcomed the TV crew for “Bosch,” the department welcomed Connelly, the novelist who still loves digging into a story like he did in his previous life as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers.

“The reporter in me, I like to use real stuff,” Connelly says. “The cell with the files in it” – that Bosch uses for his San Fernando office – “that’s really where they keep their files, an old drunk tank.”

Changes like these are part of what have kept Connelly returning to Bosch for 20 books now, an accomplishment that would have seemed inconceivable when he was writing his debut, “The Black Echo,” which arrived in 1992.

“It’s really not comprehensible to think (at the time) that I would write 20 books of any kind, let alone one character,” Connelly says. “It’s about imagination. That’s the thing I think about: How could I have known that the seeds of the character I put into the first book … would capture my imagination for 25 years? That’s what’s incredible.

“And side by side is the imagination of the readers, that they’re still interested in what makes Harry tick,” he says.

Connelly traded the familiarity of Bosch for the freshness that came with creating a new character, Renee Ballard, in “The Late Shift,” the first book in a series to feature the LAPD homicide detective, which reached bookstores in July.

“It’s a very different experience when you start off with a completely clean slate in terms of character and you get to figure out all these basic things for the first time,” he says. “There’s definitely a comfort going back to Bosch, but there’s also a challenge of digging out new stuff after 20 books. So it’s a good change.”

And it’s a change that offers opportunities for expanding the Connelly universe of police and criminals in Los Angeles, for just as Bosch’s half-brother, the lawyer Mickey Haller, has his own series and sometimes shows up in Bosch books, including the new one, Bosch will show up in the second Renee Ballard book, which is next up for the prolific writer.

“I’m writing a book for next year, ‘Dark Sacred Night,’ ” he says. “It’s Renee Ballard again, and she crosses paths with Harry Bosch.”

While not giving away too much of “Two Kinds Of Truth,” it ends with an open case that nags at Bosch to find justice for its victims, and so in a way Connelly says it’s another first for him, the first direct sequel he’s written.

“I think it has to do with his own wounds growing up,” Connelly says of Bosch’s need to step up for the underdogs in the world around him. “He didn’t get a fair shake. And when he sees other people who might be victimized or in a bad way, that’s a pitch over the middle of the plate for him.”

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments, we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.

If you see comments that you find offensive, please use the “Flag as Inappropriate” feature by hovering over the right side of the post, and pulling down on the arrow that appears. Or, contact our editors by emailing moderator@scng.com.